hypnosec writes: Whatspp has been accused of inappropriately handling personal information of its users by Canadian and Dutch privacy officials for the manner in which it goes about scanning the phone books of users’ phones. Whatsapp scans users’ phone books or contact list to find who all can the users chat with from that list. The investigations carried out by Dutch Data Protection Authority (CBP) and the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC), which has been going on since about a year, have found that the messaging company, after receiving all the numbers from a user’s contact list, doesn’t delete the number of non-users but, stores them in a hash form. This practice violates the privacy law of both the countries.